A God No One Fears

Look at it again. He clearly judges evil, since he does not want it, and he condemns it, since he forbids it — and in the same breath he acquits it, since he takes no revenge for it, and lets it off, since he inflicts no punishment. What a traitor to the truth this god is! What a fraud about his own verdict! Afraid to condemn what he does condemn, afraid to hate what he does not love, allowing to be done what he does not permit, choosing to point at what he dislikes rather than look into it. This will turn out to be a make-believe goodness and a ghost of a moral rule — going through the motions where duty is concerned, and unconcerned about sin. [a]

Listen, you sinners — and any of you who have not got that far yet, listen too, so that you can. A better god has been discovered. He never takes offense, never gets angry, never punishes; he has laid no fire in hell and no grinding of teeth in the outer darkness. He is good, purely and simply. True, he forbids every offense — but only in words. It is in your power, if you like, to sign your name to an act of homage for appearance’s sake, so that you look like a man who honors God. Your fear he does not want.

And the Marcionites are so satisfied with a show like this that they have no fear of their god at all. They say: “Only a bad man gets feared. A good man gets loved.” You fool — are you saying that the one you call Lord ought not to be feared, when the very title you give him names a power that has to be feared? And how are you going to love at all, without some fear of not loving? He is certainly not your Father, a Father you would love out of duty and fear at the same time because of his power; nor is he your lawful lord, whom you would love for his kindness and fear for his discipline. Kidnappers get loved in that fashion, and they are not feared. For power is feared only where it is just and lawful, though it can be loved even when it is crooked: crooked power stands by enticement, not by authority — by flattery, not by any real hold over you. And what is flattery more plainly than leaving sins unpunished?

Come on, then. If you do not fear God, on the ground that he is good, why do you not boil over into every kind of lust and lay hold of what is, I imagine, the chief enjoyment of life to everyone who does not fear God? Why are you not at the usual amusements — the circus that drives men mad, the arena that runs with blood, the theater and its filth? And in a persecution, when the censer is held out to you, why do you not buy your life back on the spot by denying your faith? And you answer: “Never. Never.” You say the word twice. So you do fear sin, and by fearing it you prove that the one who forbids the sin is to be feared. That is something altogether different from the dutiful show you put on for a god you do not fear — a show as twisted as his own behavior, which forbids a thing without attaching any penalty to it.

Emptier still is what they do when they are asked what is to become of every sinner on that great day, and answer that he will simply be thrown away, out of sight. But is that not itself a matter settled in court? He is judged to deserve throwing away, and judged so by a sentence of condemnation — unless, of course, the sinner is thrown away for his own salvation, so that even a piece of mildness like that can be made to fit the character of your most good and excellent god. And what is being thrown away, except losing what a man was on his way to getting had he not been thrown out — that is, salvation? So being thrown away means forfeiting salvation. And nobody can pass that sentence except an authority that has been angered and offended and that punishes sin: in other words, a judge.

And what becomes of him after he has been thrown away? “He will be thrown into the Creator’s fire.” So their god has made no arrangement of his own for getting rid of the people who sin against him, short of the brutal expedient of handing them over to the Creator? And what will the Creator do with them? Get a hell ready with double the sulfur in it, I suppose, since they blasphemed him — unless their god, out of party spirit, should happen to go easy on subjects who have revolted against his rival. What a god this is! Twisted at every point, rational at none, empty in every case — and therefore nobody at all. In his standing, his condition, his nature and every arrangement he makes, I find nothing that hangs together; not even in the sacrament of his own faith. [h]

What is baptism for, on his showing? If it is for the forgiveness of sins, how will he make it clear that he forgives sins, when he gives no sign that he ever holds them against anyone? He would hold them if he did a judge’s work. If it is for rescue from death, how can he rescue from a death he never handed anybody over to? He would have handed the sinner over to death if he had condemned sin from the start. If it is for a man’s second birth, how can he give a second birth when he never gave a first? You cannot do a thing over again if you never did it once. If it is for the giving of the Holy Spirit, how will he give the Spirit when he never gave the life in the first place? The life is, in a way, what the Spirit has to work on.

So he seals a man who, as far as he is concerned, was never unsealed; he washes a man who, as far as he is concerned, was never dirty; and he plunges into this sacrament of salvation, from head to foot, the very flesh that has no share in salvation. No farmer waters ground that will give him no crop back — unless he is as stupid as Marcion’s god.

Why lay holiness on our weakest and unworthiest part, our flesh, whether as a load to carry or a distinction to wear? And what am I to say about the idleness of a rule that makes holy what it has already made holy? Why weigh down what is weak, or decorate what is unworthy? Why not pay what it weighs down, or decorates, with salvation? Why hold work back from its proper wages by giving the flesh no salvation for it? Why let the honor of holiness die in the flesh at all?

On Marcion’s terms flesh does not go down into the water of baptism at all unless it is virgin, or widowed, or unmarried, or has bought its right to be baptized with a divorce — as though even people incapable of sex had not, every one of them, got their flesh from a marriage bed. A scheme like that plainly amounts to outlawing marriage. So let us see whether the outlawing is just. [n]

Not that we are out to spoil the happiness of a holy life, the way certain Nicolaitans are, standing up for lust and indulgence. We are people who have come to know that holiness, and who go after it and prefer it — though not at marriage’s expense. We are not replacing a bad thing with a good one, only a good thing with a better. For we do not reject marriage; we simply abstain from it. And we do not lay holiness down as a rule; we only recommend it, keeping it as a good thing, the better thing in fact, so long as a man pursues it carefully and within his own strength. At the same time we defend marriage in earnest whenever it is attacked as a polluted thing, to the Creator’s discredit.

For he gave marriage his blessing too, as an honorable estate, for the increase of the human race, just as he blessed the whole of what he made, for sound and good uses. Food and drink are not to be condemned because, dressed up too finely, they lead to gluttony; and clothing is not to be blamed because, trimmed too expensively, it swells with vanity and pride. On the same principle marriage is not to be refused because, enjoyed without limit, it is fanned into a lustful blaze. There is a great difference between a thing and the flaw in it, between a condition and the excess of it. So it is not an arrangement of this kind that deserves blame, but the extravagant use of it — and its founder judged it so himself. He said not only “Be fruitful and multiply,” but also “You shall not commit adultery” and “You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife”; and he threatened with death the unchaste, sacrilegious, monstrous outrage of adultery, and of a man lying with a man, and of a human being with an animal.

Now if some limit is set on marrying — the spiritual rule, say, which allows only one marriage after a man has come to the faith, and which rests on the authority of the Paraclete — then the right to fix that limit belongs to the one who was once so free with his permission. His to gather in, who once scattered; his to cut the tree down, who planted it; his to reap the crop, who sowed the seed; his to say, “From now on let those who have wives live as though they had none,” who once said, “Be fruitful and multiply.” The end belongs to the one the beginning belonged to. All the same, the tree is not cut down as though it deserved blame, and the grain is not reaped as though it stood condemned; they are cut and reaped because their time has come. In the same way marriage does not meet holiness’s hook and scythe because it is evil, but because it is ripe for its discharge and ready for the holiness that will in the long run bring in a heavy crop by cutting it.

Which brings me to say this about Marcion’s god: by running marriage down as an evil and unchaste thing, he is actually damaging the case of the very holiness he seems to serve. He destroys the material holiness lives on. If there is to be no marriage, there is no holiness. All the proof of self-control is lost once excess is impossible, for a good many things have their evidence only in their opposites. Just as “strength is brought to completion in weakness,” so self-control is made plain by the permission to marry. Who will be called self-controlled once you take away the thing that gave him the chance to practice self-control? What room does a famine leave for moderation at table? What credit is there in turning down ambition when you are poor? What bridling of lust can a eunuch deserve?

Still, putting a full stop to the sowing of the human race may, for all I know, suit Marcion’s most good and excellent god perfectly well. How can he want a man saved when he forbids him to be born, by taking away the arrangement his birth comes from? Where will he find anybody to set the mark of his goodness on, if he will not let him come into existence? How can he love a man whose origin he hates? Perhaps he is afraid of a surplus population: too many to set free, and he would get tired; too many heretics to make; too many splendid disciples of Marcion born to Marcionite parents. Pharaoh’s cruelty, which killed its victims at birth, will not turn out to be the more inhuman of the two. Pharaoh destroyed lives; our heretic’s god refuses to give them. The one takes people out of life, the other lets nobody into it. There is no difference between them in the killing: a human being dies at the hands of both — under the one just after birth, under the other before he is born. We would have owed you thanks, god of our heretic, if only you had blocked the Creator’s arrangement for joining male and female — since it was out of just such a joining that your Marcion was born.

But enough of Marcion’s god, who has been shown to have no existence whatever, both by our account of what it is to be the one and only God and by the state of his own attributes. That is what this whole little book has been driving at from end to end. So if we seem to anybody to have achieved very little so far, let him hold his expectations back until we examine the very Scripture Marcion quotes.